


two priests, two paths

by NightsMistress



Category: Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, post-Two Serpents Rise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-15 08:58:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5779672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caleb has heard his father's gods ever since the Skittersill Rising. He has chosen not to listen to them until now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	two priests, two paths

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merit/gifts).



> Thank you to egelantier for the beta, and for making this story what it was.

Two weeks were a long time to be away from home, especially when the city was plunged into a near-apocalyptic blackout while the twin Serpents prepared to consume all of Dresediel Lex in their mindless hunger. The air in his home was stale and dead even after Caleb opened a window to try and capture any late afternoon breezes.

Two weeks away and his home felt like it belonged to another person. A discarded Iskari romance promised swashbuckling adventure and terrible deeds, but Caleb could not remember what it was about and why its pages were soft and worn from reading. Unlit candles might have lent an air of mystery to his living room once, but in the light of day they simply looked like clutter. Unread books rested on his shelves, utterly uninviting to him. Soul fatigue was part of that. But simply moving around on crutches was exhausting; the pull of overworked muscles in his shoulders from hauling himself forward, the ache deep in his hip joint from having to balance primarily on one leg. 

Caleb surveyed his living room from his couch and found it, if not lacking, then tame. He didn’t miss Mal. He did miss excitement, as much as he could miss anything at the moment.

He didn’t jump when the couch cushion next to his dipped, but only because there was little enough soul left in him for surprise. His heart beat a little faster, an echo of the shock, terror and anger he felt whenever his father appeared out of nowhere to say his piece and disappear once again.

He raised his head from where it had rested in the corner of the couch. Next to him, his weight causing the sofa springs to creak alarmingly, was his father. Temoc God-haven. Temoc Undying. Temoc the last of the Eagle Knights. Temoc the terrorist who half of the Wardens were looking for right now, even after Heartstone’s involvement in awakening the Serpents became known. Temoc, draped in shadow and darkness, becoming visible. His own way of apologising for scaring Caleb.

Slabs of muscle and long bones made him an impossibly large mountain of a man, a figure of legend and myth rather than a someone with a family, which might be why as his legend grew his family was shattered. The ritual scars on his bare chest, echoes of the ones on Caleb’s skin, were visible like threads of silver embedded in onyx, as were the ones carved into his scalp. His large hands rested on his thighs the size of tree trunks. Temoc was a man capable of acts of great strength, and he kept himself contained and small while sitting on Caleb’s comfortably worn sofa. Perhaps it was fear of breaking his damaged son.

“Hi, Dad,” Caleb said. He did not try to get up. His father did not hand him his crutches to help him rise.

He should be angry. The last time he saw his father, Temoc had tried to carve out Teo’s heart with an obsidian knife. Had known that Teo was his son’s friend, and tied her to the altar and bled her. That was something that he should hate his father for. It was something that the King in Red had broken the priesthood of Quechaltan for.

But his anger had gone with the rest of his heart when he threw it into Aquel and Achal’s mouths to save the city. Once he had stoked his fury, kept it well-stocked. Every Warden debriefing when he was pulled from his home to explain the actions of a man he had not seen in nearly two decades. Every time he deliberately mispronounced his own name to accent his clan name, as if he did not understand the centuries of history that was bound up in the name _Altemoc_. Every time his father appeared under the cloak of shadow and disappeared on a whisper of wind once his message was passed on, ignoring how his appearances tore open wounds that never healed. Now all Caleb had were sooty shadows on the wall from where his fire had burned out, and smudges were not enough to found a righteous anger.

“Caleb.” So many meanings in the way his father said his name. None of them sounded like _I’m sorry_. “You look better.”

“So the doctors tell me,” Caleb said. And: “I didn’t know you had come to see me.”

“You were asleep.”

“Yeah,” Caleb said. “I did that a lot.” RKC poured enough of his soul back into him to keep his lungs expanding and contracting, his heart beating, but he hadn’t saved enough for anything more than that. Why bother if you’ve hedged your bets, assessed the risks, and decided it wasn’t necessary? He’d spent his time in the hospital screaming or sleeping, and sometimes both, but anything more sophisticated than the gibbering monkey-brain that told him that it was the fall that would kill him and not the impact that had broken him had been beyond him.

“You should take better care of yourself.”

“Yeah,” Caleb sighed. “I’ve heard that.” He managed a bitter twist of his mouth, the closest thing he could muster to annoyance. How could Temoc worry about his health, while also being willing to rip open his friend’s chest?

“It’s what happens when you do something new,” he said. “I was the first priest to be sacrificed on his own altar. I think I’m doing all right, all things considered.”

“You call yourself a priest?”

“It’s a figure of speech, Dad.”

“So you have seen Aquel and Achal,” Temoc said finally. Each word was weighted, rocks from the mountain. “Do you still refuse to believe in them?”

I have heard your gods every day since you inscribed their stories into my flesh, Caleb wanted to say. I have heard them speak to me and tell me to rise up and assume my place as their instrument to cut away the Craft that have liberated Dresediel Lex from their congealed, gory attentions, to use my knife to bleed Craftswomen and men to euphoria and tear their hearts from their chest.

I felt a goddess’ relieved hand on my brow when I refused Elayne Kevarian’s offer to sponsor my admission to the Hidden Schools and learn to swallow a fallen star. I felt the fire of a warrior god in my belly when the Wardens questioned Mom for hours, refusing to believe she had not spoken to you. I have tasted salt-air and known it is a god demanding my attention. It is not that I do not believe in your gods. It is that I refuse to be their instrument, and until now I did not know of another path I could take.

“They’ll exist whether I believe in them or not,” he said instead. Once he might have shouted that, screamed it futilely at his father’s face, like throwing a cup of water at a cliff face and expecting it to crumble. He knew that, and wasn’t afraid that he was lesser for it. His soul would return in time, filling him as the broken bone in his leg knit together, so the doctors had told him. He would just have to wait.

Caleb thought that he could wait.

“What will you do now?” In his father’s words was the implicit offer he had made Caleb on his twenty-fourth birthday, while Caleb was half-drunk on tequila and a pending job offer: there is always a place with me. 

“I’m leaving RKC,” Caleb said. 

“So I have heard,” Temoc replied.

Caleb blinked. “How?” he managed. “I only told Teo yesterday.”

“I did not hear it from the altar maid.”

Caleb let the comment about Teo being an altar maid slide. There were more important issues. “You heard it from the King in Red?”

“Kopil’s smallness means he gloats,” Temoc said. There was a terrible history in the way that Temoc said the King in Red’s name. Caleb had known, of course, of the mutual river of hatred that runs between the shores of Temoc and the King in Red. It had been why, when Caleb accepted the job offer with Red King Consolidated, he had done little to draw attention to himself. The child of Temoc Almotil must always assess risks given how large the spectre of his father loomed, and Caleb Altemoc was very good at assessing risks. He had thought he had insulated himself from risk arising from whose child he was. The Skittersill Rising was seventeen years ago, and he had thought that most of the world had moved on from it.

Then Mal, orphan of the Rising, summoned the Two Serpents to crush Red King Consolidated, and it seemed that the world had not moved on at all. Instead, it had tried to pretend its past was not there, like a child covering her face with a blanket to hide from a monster: if I can’t see you you can’t hurt me.

“How did he even — no,” Caleb cut himself off. “I don’t really want to know what he gloats to you about. Or how.”

“A man’s pride is his children,” Temoc said. It was unclear if this was a homily or something Temoc genuinely believed. It didn’t really matter. “Kopil knows this. He has ways of communicating with me when it comes to you.”

The idea of his father and his boss talking about him, even as a kind of point-scoring exercise between them, was horrible enough for Caleb to feel mildly ill even with soul fatigue. He might have felt horrified without it. It was a peculiar feeling, suspecting that the Serpents were the only reason why Caleb did not scream at his father. Instead he sighed, a shuddering thing. “I should have known. Did he tell you what I meant to do?”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“Why?”

“You are my son, my son threw his heart into the Serpent’s mouth to save the city. Is it so terrible that I would want to hear about your future goals?”

 _Pride,_ Caleb thought. _Huh._ It wasn’t what he had expected. “All right, Dad. I’m going to start something new: a partnership with the gods. Dresediel Lex needs water, and our thirst won’t get any better the longer we wait. The gods can bring water to the desert and we can find a way to share that gift without the need for sacrifice.”

“You speak of heresy.” There was no condemnation in Temoc’s voice. The pride remained though, a bedrock on which his words were founded. 

“I speak of truth, Dad. The world of sacrificing people to the gods is gone. We can be abreast the wave of history, or die under it. Change or die. Those are our only options.”

“You are not the first to say these words.”

“No,” Caleb said, because it must be true rather than knowing it was true. “But I must be the one to make it work.”

Temoc looked at him for a long moment. “I will not be seeing you for some time. There are some matters I must attend to. But before I left, I wanted to see that you would be well.” He smiled, and it was painful to see the pride in it. “I do not know if you will succeed. But in this, you are your mother’s son. I will see you when I am finished.”

A late afternoon breeze wafted through the window, hot and dry and stinging Caleb’s eyes. He knew that when he opened them his father would be gone. 

“Goodbye, Dad,” he muttered. “Nice talk.”


End file.
